The storage of drugs and other medical supplies has become a growing concern for hospitals, suppliers, health care providers and patients. Errors by hospital personnel in the dispensing of drugs can cause serious injury to patients. Some of these errors may be reduced by storing drugs and other medical supplies in a safe and ergonomic manner.
Typically, health care providers, such as hospitals, have an internal pharmacy that co-ordinates the dispensing of drugs to patients. These pharmacies have long been burdened with the increasingly complex inventory management that results from caring for hundreds of patients every day. The responsibilities of an internal pharmacy may include: filling individual patient prescriptions on a daily basis; maintaining sufficient inventory of each drug in the hospital stock to administer to patients on a daily basis; tracking of drug administration to prevent patients from being given drugs that have adverse effects when combined with other drugs; accounting for the purchase of drugs for use in the hospital; accounting associated with the administering of drugs to individual patients; distributing drugs to the appropriate patient care or procedural units within the hospital to suit each unit's daily demands; tracking of drug expiration dates to rid inventories of expired drugs; and tracking of drug lot numbers, for example, in the event of a recall of a particular drug or drug lot number. Hospital and pharmacy functions may be classified to include six critical processes: selection, storage, ordering and transcribing, dispensing, administering and monitoring of medical supplies.
In recent years, hospitals have been assisted with drug distribution management by the introduction of drug dispensing machines and health care supply dispensing machines. These dispensing machines have effectively created branches of the pharmacy department at each patient care or procedural unit where the dispensing machines are located. The dispensing machines are usually connected to a computer system within the internal pharmacy for tracking drugs that are to be administered to patients in a particular patient care location of the hospital. Hospitals have thus improved the manner in which drugs are dispensed to patients, by having the dispensing machines report (through the computer system) the variety and quantities of drugs and medical supplies being dispensed.
As the automated medication dispensing industry has matured, state regulatory agencies are beginning to address new technologies in the field and require assurance that an item in a section or drawer of a medical supply dispensing machine is exactly what the machine represents it to be. At present, the storage of drugs and other medical supplies in dispensing units is managed on an ad hoc basis by hospital personnel. Dispensing machines are arranged and re-arranged as needed depending on patient requirements, par levels and various other criteria. It is not uncommon for drugs to be packaged in containers which look alike (look-alike drugs), resulting in the incorrect storage of drugs owing to hospital personnel mistakenly placing drugs with similar containers or packaging in the wrong compartments of dispensing machines. These drugs may then be incorrectly retrieved and administered. Hospital personnel may also mistakenly retrieve the wrong drugs, if drugs packaged in similar containers are stored in close proximity in a dispensing machine. The same mistaken storage or mistaken retrieval may be caused by drugs with similar sounding names or names that are spelled similarly (sound-alike drugs).